Creation
and Maintenance of Effective School-Work Linkages:
Implications for Systemic Reform
Stephanie
Alter Jones and James E. Rosenbaum
Abstract
Most policy proposals addressing the school-to-work
transition have focused on broad, national strategies for change.
However, forging successful connections between youth and the labor
market depends upon the individual actions and interactions of employers,
students, and schools. In particular, the specific ways that schools
and employers interact may be crucial in determining their effectiveness
at student job placement. In order to inform policy about the formation
of school-employer partnerships, this paper investigates such linkages
in an exemplary school, identifying the elements that enable successful
and replicable reform.
This case study explores the ways linkages operate in a school that
relies on third-party job coordinators to mediate between teachers
and employers. This model has succeeded in providing weak contacts
with a large number of local employers. However, we find that the
job coodinators do not primarily explain the schools' job placement
success. Instead, we find that the formal third-party system is
bolstered and made successful by its hidden non-system, a network
of teachers who use their informal industry contacts to place students.
Our case study concludes that while third-party linkage arrangements
may provide "loose ties" to students, such ties are most effective
in the diffusion of information about job openings, not for providing
access to jobs. Instead, we suggest that direct, personalized teacher-employer
connections offer important assets for school-to-work reforms and
may become the basis for systematic connections between high schools
and the work world.
Stephanie Alter Jones, School
of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University
James E. Rosenbaum, School of Education
and Social Policy, Northwestern University
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